Deeplinks Blog posts about Do Not Track

When Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer uncovered a Google workaround to circumvent the default privacy settings on Safari, EFF called on Google to change their tune on privacy by respecting the Do Not Track flag and building it into the Chrome browser. We specifically praised the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) multi-stakeholder process, which for a year has been convening consumer advocates, Internet companies, and technologists to craft how companies that receive the Do Not Track signal should respond.

Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple's default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking.

This tracking, discovered by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, was a technical side-effect—probably an unintended side-effect—of a system that Google built to pass social personalization information (like, “your friend Suzy +1'ed this ad about candy”) from the google.com domain to the doubleclick.net domain. Further technical explanation can be found below.

Last week, the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), as association of 6 online advertising groups1, published a set of Self-Regulatory Principles for Multi-Site Data. These principles are designed to cover data collection above and beyond the standards the group adopted for behavioral advertising.

Next week, several EFF staffers will be speaking at the first-ever Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (Rightscon) in San Francisco. The conference, organized by Access Now and sponsored by several foundations and companies, brings together some of the leading thinkers in the digital human rights space, as well as representatives of technology companies from Silicon Valley and beyond for discussions on the human rights implications of the ICT industry. The conference (tickets are still available here!) is jam-packed with excellent speakers and participants, and promises to provide new insights into solutions for the myriad problems facing Silicon Valley companies today.

There's been a lot of action on consumer privacy in DC over the past year, and while some of that action seems to have stalled (more on that in another post), there's still movement in the private sector—mainly around "Do Not Track (DNT) and Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs).

Follow the W3C Discussion!

W3C is an open process that invites participation from many different stakeholders. Even if you can't make it to Boston, you can follow along by visiting: